Are the McGills Even Irish?
A St. Patrick’s Day Pub Tale, by ChrisTina Applegate & her AI pal Grok.

Now gather close a moment, and I’ll tell ye a curious little tale I stumbled upon while preparing the St. Patrick’s Day highlight for Mary.

I says to myself, “Christine, if ye want a proper Irish story, ye’d best go straight to the well.” And the well, of course, is that grand old book of ours, The McGills by Augustus McGill.

So off I went, thumbing through the pages, expectin’ tales of proud Irishmen, green hills, and our own Patrick McGill and his brother Arthur sailin’ out of the Bay of Belfast and straight into the thick of the Revolutionary War.

And sure enough, there were the stories.

But then—hold on now—I came across a passage that near made me drop my tea.

Wait… what’s this now?

Are we even Irish?

We’ve always known that Patrick and Arthur came from Belfast, and no one’s disputin’ the ships left from Irish shores. But the question crept in all the same, sly as a fox in the henhouse:

Were their roots truly Irish…

—or, saints preserve us—Scottish?

Now there’s a thought to spoil a perfectly good Irish American Month.

Well, it turns out the mystery lies in the name itself.

You see, our patriarch Patrick never wrote his name McGill at all—at least not at first. No indeed. The man wrote it M’gill, with a tidy little apostrophe sitting there like it knew a secret.

But along came the Pennsylvania Land Office clerks, scratching away with their quills and their ledgers, and when they wrote the land titles, they spelled it McGill. And once a government clerk writes your name on a land patent, well then, that’s the name you’ll be signing if you want to keep the farm.

And so the spelling stuck, whether Patrick liked it or not.

Governor Andrew Ryan McGill later explained the whole business this way in Augustus McGill’s book:

“My grandfather, Patrick McGill wrote his name thus M’gill, using the apostrophe, indicating the omission of a letter or letters between the M and G… The letters omitted may have been ac-ak-or simply a or c as used in the forms Macgill-Makgill-Magill or McGill, all well known Scotch forms of great antiquity and rarely found in ancient Irish nomenclature.

The change from the apostrophe to -c- was made by the Clerks in the Pennsylvania Land Office when the State issued patents to the McGills for public lands purchased by them. Therefore, in order to correspond with the title, all legal documents were signed McGill and the form gradually came into general use…

These several forms all mean the same and… establish the fact of our Scotch antecedents.”

Well now.

There it is in plain print.

After all these years of wearin’ green, singin’ Irish songs, and claimin’ the old country, it seems our name itself might’ve been carryin’ a wee bit of Scotland in its pocket the whole time.

But now listen here—don’t be throwin’ out the shamrocks just yet.

As that English fellow Shakespeare once said—and he wasn’t Irish either—

“What’s in a name?”

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

And whether the name leaned Irish, Scottish, or a bit of both, one thing’s certain: Patrick and Arthur crossed the sea, stood tall in the days of the Revolution, and planted a family tree that’s still growin’ strong today.

So go on then.

Wear the green.
Eat the corned beef.
Tap your foot to a fiddle if you hear one.

And lift your voice so Ireland—and Scotland too, if they’re listenin’—can hear you.

Erin Go Bragh! Ireland Forever! 🍀